Читать книгу Static Demagogue - Rhys Thomas - Страница 3

Upon the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 – The state of Ost Deutschland and it’s devious leader, Erich Honecker, ceased to exist. The Stasi (East German Secret Police) was run by Erich Mielke. He was very unpopular. But he stayed as head of the organisation from 1957 until 1989. During the Eighties, the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants. One in fifty East Germans were spying for the Stasi! The Stasi motto was “Schild und Schwert der Partei” (Shield and Sword of the Party). But a vestige of the powerful Staat Sicherheit Polizei, or Stasi, had established a secret programme to embed former Stasi agents with new identities and powerful jobs in the West. Specifically, the United States. The name of this program (US speak) was West Oasis. The West German authorities knew nothing of this organisation. Not that it had order. It worked like society – friends were kept, new friends made.

To all intents and purposes, agents seemed like ordinary, American citizens. They knew the culture, had all the seventies-era patches on their clothes, knew the most beloved pop songs, knew the national anthem, had sworn allegiance to the flag and had entered the United States initially with consummate ease. One of their number was from Leipzig originally. His name was Amory Du Brokker. He was living in Washington State. Seattle. Grunge Central. In Ost Deutschland, Amory Du Brokker had been an assassin. He killed the most vociferous opponents of the state. Anybody who opposed Honecker. The state epitomised german thoroughness (deutsche gruendlichkeit).

The Stasi also had relations with Algerians who had purchased an automated way of spreading terror. The system involved a digital call centre which was a front for nuisance calling. Algerian telecomms engineers had programmed the system in the call centre to phone small businesses and terrorize mainly vulnerable women who were isolated in their job roles! It was wicked but there was no way to stop the atrocity!

Geography was also no barrier to Stasi intrigue. The story of Wolfgang Welsch (an East German who opposed the Stasi regime and smuggled countless Germans away to the West) involved attempted poisoning using a gram of thallium. The perpetrator was Peter Haak, who mixed the Thallium into some hamburgers Welsch was cooking for his family while on holiday in Israel. Luckily, Welsch’s wife and daughter vomited out the Burgers immediately, and Welsch himself drank enough alcohol to negate the effect of the Thallium and flush it out of his system. Peter Haak was arrested for episodes such as this by the unified German authorities and imprisoned for six and a half years.

It was estimated that as many as 4,444 East Germans lost their lives in the Former East Germany. Some were shot trying to scale the Berlin Wall, while others were shot in the interior of East Germany. As many as 40,000 political offences occurred during the forty year Stasi regime.

Thousands of letters were discovered in Stasi archives, having first been shredded. These letters were painstakingly reassembled for scrutiny, a process that took between eight weeks and three months per sack of shredded documents. The unified german authorities were able to acquire 200,000 letters using this process. They implicated, most significantly, Lothar de Maiziere (the last Premier of the DDR, or East Germany). His code name in the Stasi was “Cerny”. He eventually lost all influence and passed into obscurity.

Franco Werkenthin (a West German prosecutor) called the legal apparatus he was working within “die jauche der Justiz” (the cesspool of justice”) as he had seen the corruption amongst judges (Rechtsbeugung) and thus this weakened his ability to prosecute Stasi officials. The authorities only managed 73 convictions out of thousands of suspects.

Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, summed up the Stasi when he said they were “worse than the Gestapo.”

A dangerous man on a dangerous continent. The year was 1988. Amory Du Brokker had a fat mother and an overweight, obnoxious father who was anti-Honecker. The family were planning a holiday to Wales.

Life was looking good! It was June 1988. The Du Brokkers had just entered the United Kingdom. For them, it was a rare trip abroad. But this meant so much more. ……..A chance to practice English with near flawless English accents…… ……..An opportunity to see a different system at work…….. ……..Possibility to make new friends and influence people……. In the short stay car park at Gatwick Airport was the obligatory Ford Escort hire car. It came with an Avis boarding card and full tank of juice. Father Du Brokker revved his engine and navigated towards the M23. He had so little time and, as it was 18-00 on 23/06/1988 – he wished to be in Chepstow, South Wales by 22-00 hours. He had a room booked at the Castle hotel in town. The hotel had a spectacular backdrop of Chepstow Castle.

Du Brokker senior was a gun decommissioner by trade. He travelled the world purchasing guns consignments for destruction. He was an earnest man, portly with a scrawny beard and bushy eyebrows. He did not speak much about his work to Amory or his equally portly wife (who was secretly a “mitarbeiter”). So Gustavus Du Brokker and wife travelled at the behest of the Honeckers, Ernst and Margot, to promote the DDR as a nation to be accepted into the international fold. Young Amory never suspected his mother of espionage, despite the spyware of holiday Praktica SLR camera and those strange, long phone calls where he heard a strange rattling sound from behind the closed bedroom door. It never occurred to him until his teens that his mutter listened to others’ mutterings!

So here they were in Wales. Du Brokker was twelve and his loins were girted at that age. His parents were typical, dour teutons. Nobody would be interested in these strange German tourists. Right…..?

Wrong! The strange sect that burned English holiday homes within Wales was. Meibion Glyndwr was a tiny organisation devoted to fervent Welsh nationalism. They could not obtain guns, but they were always looking for new allies. Now Gretel Du Brokker was a secret accomplice. But what could she do to convince them of her loyalty? She had the obligatory tranche of forged passports she took for her foreign trips. They were expertly forged by ex-Nazi forgers who had worked for ODESSA, the organisation which devoted much energy and expertise to hiding ex-Nazis in South America. Perhaps those passports would persuade Meibion Glyndwr that she was compliant to integrating as a different nationality, Welsh perhaps?

The Germans vacated their residence at the Chepstow Hotel for a resplendent cottage within the Brecon Beacons national park. Sure, the British Army and SAS used the Beacons for endurance training. But most of the park was just famed for a lush if desolate beauty.

And so, Amory Du Brokker acquired his hatred of fat women by the one act that defined the sole UK trip he made as a child. That suspicious Welsh cottage fire that killed Gustavus, his body stranded amid the accelerants and false passports left for his dismay by his morally-dubious wife. All they heard was the screams from the inferno. She feigned comforting Amory in the blaze glow as the white-walled and ivy embroidered cottage seared before them. Firefighters offered words of condolence as the paramedics arrived to treat the minor burns on Gretel and Amory. Despite an investigation, nothing came up about foul play. Not an iota.

Gretel Du Brokker had a sad childhood, due to her portly stature. She was bullied from an early age and had stern parents. She never had many boyfriends before Gustavus, but she learnt from the Stasi the importance of discretion. She tried to impart that to her son, who was curious about his mother and her predilection for reading matter. Whereas Gustavus was an active man who loved sports, Amory was more like his mother. He liked fiction books, whereas Gretel liked academia. That piqued Amory. She also seemed to take a great many photographs, yet never produced the amount she seemed to take? It was as if she was sending rolls of film somewhere. Why was she so secretive whilst doing/about her hobbies?

From this early age, Du Brokker and his psyche were formed. His mother had committed a terrible act, but only she could exonerate her son. Which she never did. She played along, as the dutiful Stasi mitarbeiter she was. Only later in life, when Stasi archives were liberated by the Western authorities, did her son uncover the truth! A sad tale.

Doctor Sian Contraire was rifling through her carefully documented notes on her iPad. She was a gamine, slender woman. In her thirties, she had hawkish, hooded eyes and a chiseled face. Her hair was a shock of blonde insolence, frazzled like a weeping willow. She did not dwell on circumstance, preferring to analyze her subject, who was accordingly….

“Victimised at an early age? Quite possibly bullied as a child? Medical History may reveal sources of malcontent. Still so much to learn about subject. Earlier family history unclear because of delusional episodes. Never explains his life even on prompting. Time to consult some medical journals. Possibly Merck. Perhaps too technical – suggested physical trauma. More likely Freud. Yes, Sigmund Freud. A man inspired by the poetry of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Freud had also worked with German physician Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. Freud had also worked with Charcot (who was director at the Salpêtrière a mental hospital in Paris where he researched treatment of mental patients using Hypnosis). This period of Freud’s career interested Contriare – so she consulted one of his works – “A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism: With Some Remarks on the Origin of Hysterical Symptoms Through ‘Counterwill’” which was an 1892 paper. Contraire also researched information about the Cathartic technique for accessing memory and extracting information. Freud had developed this system with his friend Josef Breuer, a Viennese Physician. She discovered some useful information about control mechanisms……she could use medication with this technique….. She stared across at the prone figure on the Chaises Longue…… Still taking Zyprexa Olanzapine to fight depression. Increase dosage? “……Stay……with me, Amory…..!!”…….”